LFS(Linux From Scratch) Frustrations

Well, today has been frustrating. Very frustrating. I’ve been working on the whole LFS project for over 13 hours now[Compiling can be a biaaaaachh wo0t!]. I reached section 6.10(Adjusting the Toolchain) here. This is where my problems began.

After executing the following snippets:

mv -v /tools/bin/{ld,ld-old}
mv -v /tools/$(uname -m)-pc-linux-gnu/bin/{ld,ld-old}
mv -v /tools/bin/{ld-new,ld}
ln -sv /tools/bin/ld /tools/$(uname -m)-pc-linux-gnu/bin/ld

and

gcc -dumpspecs | sed -e 's@/tools@@g'                   \
    -e '/\*startfile_prefix_spec:/{n;s@.*@/usr/lib/ @}' \
    -e '/\*cpp:/{n;s@$@ -isystem /usr/include@}' >      \
    `dirname $(gcc --print-libgcc-file-name)`/specs``

I encountered errors. One of them being something along the lines _could not find ld_. I figured out that I missed an ld file in my tools directory. Further investigations[via history] showed that I skipped some very 2 vital steps when compiling Binutils in section 5.9 here. I did not copy ld to ld-new in the /tools/bin directory. Consequences? I’ll have to start the whole goddamn build process again tomorrow goddamnit!

Well, mistakes aside, I have learnt something about the linux file systems[All about +ve energy here] and working with the terminal. It’s interesting how Linux is organised. Every directory has a specific purpose e.g. the etc directory for configuration files, the dev directory for placing virtual FS etc etc etc[not the etc directory Lol!]. I’ve also come to appreciate the concept of users and groups in the ‘grand scheme’ of things.

On working on the terminal, here are some really neat things with braces[which when used with other commands can be quite useful]:

// Truncating the contents of a variable
$ var="Savagetfs"
$ echo ${var%t*}
// Result:
$ Savage 
// Making substitutions similar to sed
$ var="I hate thee Luffy Dono"; echo ${var/hate/love}
// Result: 
$ I love thee Luffy Done
// Iterating over loops
$ echo {0..2}
// Result
$ 0 1 2

There’s so much more you can do with this stuff. Here’s a neat example. Say you want to create a file structure with the following tree structure

. ├── build  
│   ├── css  
│   ├── html  
│   ├── js  
│   └── scss  
└── src  
├── css  
├── html  
├── js  
└── scss

Any of the following would work[vis-a-vis the above]:

// Method 1
$ folders=( html css js scss)
$ for i in ${folders[@]}; do mkdir -pv build/$i; done
$ for i in ${folders[@]}; do mkdir -pv src/$i; done
$ unset folders

// Method 2
// A verbose way of doing this
$ mkdir -pv src/{html,css,js,scss} build{html,css,js,scss}

// Method 3
// The elegant way
$ mkdir -pv {src,build}/{html,css,js,scss}

Well, there are many other small neat things you could for example:

// When editing config files 
// For example, backing up your files 
// which would involve sth like this: 
// mv /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist.old
$ mv /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist{,.old}

I’ll resume the build process again tomorrow. I’ll be more careful this time. My goal is to finish the whole LFS project before this coming Saturday[04 March ‘17] where there’ll be a NAILUG event.